Aside from older age and male gender, obesity is one of the most important risk factors for severe Covid. Compared to those with a healthy BMI, the obese (those with a BMI greater than 30) are about twice as likely to end up in the ICU, and are about 20% more likely to die.
Which raises the question: is obesity a modifiable risk factor? Can obese people reduce their risk of severe Covid by losing a large amount of bodyweight? While the answer might seem obvious, it isn’t necessarily ‘yes’.
Rather than obesity per se, it might be some factor strongly correlated with obesity that predisposes you to severe Covid. Or perhaps obesity leads to permanent changes in the body, so that even once you lose the extra bodyweight, you’re still at higher risk than someone who was never obese to begin with.
It’s certainly possible. Yet a new study suggests that obesity is a modifiable risk factor. Ali Aminian and colleagues examined a cohort of obese people who’d had gastric bypass surgery at particular hospital in Cleveland between 2004 and 2017.
Members of this cohort were matched to similar individuals who’d never had gastric bypass surgery. Matching was based on age, sex, race, BMI at the time of surgery and an index of comorbidities.
The researchers therefore compared two groups: obese people who’d lost weight thanks to gastric bypass surgery; and obese people who’d never had gastric bypass surgery. Note: most members of the surgery group were still obese by the time of the pandemic. Their average BMI was 38, compared to 46 in the control group.
The groups were compared with respect to their Covid outcomes during the first year of the pandemic. What did the researchers find? Their main results are shown in the figure below.
The two groups had almost identical infection rates, as shown in the top-left chart. However, the incidence of severe Covid was much higher in the control group, as shown in the other three charts. This provides relatively strong evidence that losing weight does reduce the risk of severe Covid.
So far, governments have made very little effort to encourage weight loss during the pandemic. (One exception is a recent campaign by the tech-savvy government of El Salvador.) In fact, the net effect of Britain’s lockdowns has been to increase the rate of obesity.
But if Aminian and colleagues’ findings hold up, more emphasis on weight loss is clearly warranted – especially since obesity is risk factor for various medical conditions, not just Covid.
Of course, the main obstacle to promoting weight loss in the current year is not lack of evidence, but concerns around ‘fat-shaming’. To reduce stigma around obesity, you’re supposed to affirm that people can be ‘healthy at any size’. Unfortunately for the activists, this simply isn’t true.
Reducing obesity isn’t a silver bullet in the fight against Covid. But it would certainly help.
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All very worthy stuff, but:
“the fight against Covid”
Why on earth would there be a “fight against covid” that’s of any more significance than worthy but specialist efforts to “defeat” the common cold or the flu?
It’s just not an issue that should be hyped like that, imo, in the current context of the ongoing cynical abuse of a supposed “emergency” throughout the world to grab power and.to shamelessly profiteer.
You mentioned splitting infinitives in the previous article. I just think things sound much nicer if infinitives aren’t split. In your comment above, “……to profiteer shamelessly” sounds much nicer to me. Just a personal thing.
I’d usually agree, but since my typing fingers have been leading me into misuse of apostrophes today, I’m in no position to criticise.
My suspicion is it probably sounds nicer to you because you’ve internalised the supposed rule.
Regardless, we aren’t dealing with a legitimate hard and fast rule here, and de gustibus non est disputandum.
Though to some extent, imo, there’s a case for using split infinitives more often that would otherwise be the case, simply to help break us free from the common misconception that there’s a prescriptive rule about it.
The so-called split infinitive is bogus rubbish. It derives from an attempt to impose the rules of Latin grammar on English. The ‘to’ in the so-called English infinitive was press-ganged to hide the fact that modern English has no infinitive.
Old English had one. It ended in -en like the modern German infinitive. It died out in the Middle Ages. Modern pGerman (or French, or Latin) infinitives can’t be ‘split’. You can’t say ‘Ich werde geh heute en’, or ‘J’aime mang beaucoup er’. But there’s no reason all why you can’t say ‘to boldly go’ unless you’re a semi-educated person with no understanding of real English grammar but a desire to seem cleverer than you are.
Have to say I have no idea about ‘split infinitives’ but reading the comment from JASA made me think of a particularly annoying, pretentious colleague I used to work alongside.
I agree. Why have two parts to the infinitive if not so that we can split it? “to boldly go” sounds more natural than “to go boldly”. And “boldly to go” is the sort of English up with which I will not put.
It’s so strange that covid caused less myocarditis until the stabs were rolled and out then somehow covid started causing more… https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2022/02/weird-myocarditis-rates-31-france-75-germany-reason/
Covid-19 may cause myocarditis, thanks to the spike proteins being cleaved. The so-called vaccine also floods your body with a variable quantity of spike protein. It’s not surprising that they have similar effects.
Fortunately hardly anyone gets Covid-19, they just get SARS-CoV-2. So in the vast majority of cases, the so-called vaccine just adds additional myocarditis risk that the victim wouldn’t experience from the virus anyway.
Obesity was signalled as a risk factor early on, so since the first lockdown I have summoned up the willpower and now have shed 17kg. Tested positive (LFT) a couple of weeks ago and ‘suffered’ only 4-days of minor symptoms (lower back ache, dry cough, lack of energy). Did isolate for a week (but plenty of fresh air walking the dog, socially distanced) and no additional bed-rest necessary – carried on as normal, since I work from home anyway. So, altogether a very minor infection. Of course, this is also probably due to the fact that I have been taking vits A, B12, C, D3, K2, Quercetin and Zinc daily and Ivermectin weekly ! Don’t want to risk depressing my healthy immune system by accepting the filthy jabs.
Congrats on the weightloss!
Thanks DB – I went for the low carbs / high good fats option – feel so much better.
That worked for me, too. 14 to 15kg lighter and much faster around a tennis court!
Good on ya
Thanks PP
Fantastic. Well done.
There is lot of evidence that poor metabolic health worsens outcomes from covid. And that’s been clear from Spring 2020.
Do a search for metabolic health covid or metabolic syndrome covid or insulin resistance covid and take your pick from the scientific papers and articles that come up. Some papers explain the associations, some explain the mechanisms
And poor metabolic health associates with obesity. It’s not the weight per se.
Plenty of ways to improve metabolic health through low carbohydrate, high healthy fat, real food nutrition or something similar. And with that incidentally comes weight loss, but metabolic health improves before the weight disappears.
Here’s the cardiologist Aseem Malhotra from July 2020 for example.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SvDQh86uHJA
Of course, you can be hefty but still fit. It’s hard not to notice those who get so out of shape, that they struggle to breathe just walking down the road.
“ some factor strongly correlated with obesity”.
Would that be being a greedy, lazy bastard?
I suggest the following mechanism:
A person who is obese is in a state of heightened inflammation. Thus any innate response to infection is likely to be insignificant as one of the first responses is to induce an inflammatory response. The same is true in the elderly and those with other chronic conditions including autoimmune diseases.
It’s also likely that obese folk tend to eat a lot of sugars and carbs, which may mean that they enter into any period of illness suffering from diabetes or pre-diabetes, which probably doesn’t help what happens to their bodies once the disease starts to register its effects. Having a lot of body mass tends to coincide with taking little exercise, so muscle loss is also a problem. The organs tend to be coated with visceral fat, which can’t help their functioning while undergoing a challenging disease.
However, not everyone with type 2 diabetes is obese and not everyone who is obese is diabetic. In fact there’s a suggestion that type 2 diabetics may have a sub clinical under active thyroid, and that hypothyroidism is under treated even when diagnosed.
The other day, I made a comment about a clearly
fatoverweight nurse shown in one particular article’s header-photograph. I also added a comment about what thatfatobese women could do to help herself reduce weight and protect herself from one of the most important risk factors for severe Covid: obesity. Those comments were deleted… probably because I pointed out the fact that someone wasfatobese. Now, we have an article devoted tofatobese people just because it suits the narrative. Hypocrisy much.Probably a
fatobese reader red flagged you.“As the Govt consults on a British Bill of Rights, it needs to make free speech a cornerstone of any constitutional change. Speech that people find offensive – however hurtful – must be protected in a free society, or we forfeit our basic liberal norms.”
https://twitter.com/SpeechUnion/status/1488827792544436225
Granted he might argue that the article referenced was referring to criminalisation rather than to censorship in privately owned publications, but that’s pretty close to how the leftists defend their cancel culture, that the FSU spends all its time fighting elsewhere.
If he’s going to argue that we should tolerate “offensive” speech in the public square (and I would say he’s correct), then the least he can do imo is tolerate it in his own publications.
It’s certainly a puzzling contradiction of the stated principles.
Yay. Queue the calls from the usual suspects to heavily tax saturated fats, sugars, cheese, fatty meats etc. Then let’s subsidise processed fungus substitutes, vegan burgers full of crap that makes them “bleed” (just why?) and vegan “cheese”, yuck – because that factory processed chemical junk is going to be so much better for our health isn’t it?
‘A little of what you fancy does you good’.
The modern problem is a lot of what we fancy, coupled with more labour-saving devices than you could shake a stick at (if you don’t have a device that does your stick-shaking for you, that is).
I think that what the plandemic and the “vaccines” are really all about puts risk factors related to age, gender and the virus into the ha’penny place.
There’s a lot of evidence that what has occurred over the last two years has been a massive field trial. There seems to be no doubt that many of the “vaccine” batches were toxic, and that this was purposeful and most likely done to gauge the effects different levels of toxicity would have on different sections of a population.
How many of the “inoculated” have had ten-, twenty- or thirty-years knocked off their lives? How many people will die in 2030 from liver failure that resulted from a toxin they were given in 2021?
Then there’s the nanotechnology that basically computerises the human body and which can send information about the body to smart phones and other devices. The graphene and hydrogel, and reports of magnets adhering to the sites where people got injected, are clear indications that something other than disease preventing medications were in these “vaccines”.
The nanotechnology is said to be designed to be inserted via the hydrogel in microscopic doses, and when in the body it gathers together and assembles into larger components. This may explain their eagerness to get people to keep accepting booster shots, and the drive to inject children.
To people in the older age group this will sound like science fiction, too unbelievable and far-fetched. And to the younger age group it will be seen as simply too evil to be possibly real.
The young have been taught for decades that evil doesn’t exist. They’ve learned that the murderers, the terrorists, and the rapists do what they do because they are victims who are essentially in search of love and understanding. And if these people were only shown the love and understanding they sought, we’d have paradise on earth.
The best trick the Devil ever pulled on people was to convince them he wasn’t real.
BTW: Did you know that the average American child gets 70 shots of vaccines before his/her eighteenth birthday? Does this correlate with the high amount of autism and general imbecility to be found in this currently dying country?
Here’s an example of US imbecility. Dr Matthew Harris was a former University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) ‘Philosophy of Race’ lecturer. He sent an 800-word manifesto to his former university threatening to carry-out a mass shooting on their premises.
It’s claimed that UCLA attempted to keep this serious threat from the students – they didn’t want bad publicity for their obviously failing and dangerous Affirmative Action idiocy – I read some of Harris’ manifesto, and he couldn’t ever string two words together.
American Indians lived in North America for thousands of years and did quite well without any vaccines. White Europeans, Blacks and Asians lived there for 400 years without vaccines and also did quite well.
What was the environmental or physiological change in modern times that brought about the need for North American citizens to be inoculated almost as often as they visit the toilet?
The change that occurred was a mental and moral one. They became idiots and morally cowardly. You might blame the Long March Through the Institutions, but it would be impossible to make idiots out of normal people without their compliance.
And they exported this crap globally. The COVID-19 plandemic got its kick-start in the USA. Bill Gates is the USA’s front of house man in all things plandemic and vaccine.
Bill Gates is accused of committing very serious crimes in India and Africa:
If you skip to the 03:40 mark in this video, you’ll clearly hear Bill Gates’ say (if you want to see the real Bill Gates, this 4-minute is time well spent):
“… Vaccines are going very well, things like producing childhood death …”
This video at the 02:50 mark shows Ronald Reagan basically giving US pharmaceutical companies carte blanche to hurt and injure people without risk of having to financially compensate them. If you are poisoned by Big Pharma in the US, your only redress is to sue the government, and if you win, your fellow taxpayers compensate you.
There are claims that Gates is under investigation in India; what is certain is that Indians are angry with him. It would not be safe for Gates’ to walk down a street in this country. If Gates was actually wanted by the Indian authorities, would the Yanks extradite him? Probably not.
Yet they’ll hound Assange to the ends of the earth in a weird quest to get revenge for the fact they could not keep their own secrets secure. The West is so far gone with infantilism, cowardliness and arrogance that it will take a vicious war to bring it back to its senses.
There’s probably an obvious answer that I’ve missed, but –
why do those charts all have headings that read ‘Kaplan-Meier estimates for…’
Was this a study (as I thought was implied) or was it some kind of ‘modelling’ exercise?
Dr David Grimes suggests that Vitamin D is involved. He says that in obese people Vitamin D gets absorbed by fat cells and so is not available for the immune system
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WjbpkeSqLjc
The sale of crap food brings huge profits. It also brings spin-off profits insofar as being a lardarse often keeps a person’s self-respect low and therefore boosts demand for things like the latest smartphones, Netflix subscriptions, or fixed-odds betting terminals, or whatever else it is that stupid people may want.
It would be as easy as p*ss to
Then do the same for diet. It’s already been found that a vegetarian diet correlates with a lower incidence of severe problems with SARSCoV2, compared with a dead-animal diet.
But no. All the rulers’ officials can say is “Everyone must be vaccinated”.
I stick my fingers in my ears and go “laaaaa” whenever I hear some berk talk about “public health” while ignoring questions of diet and exercise. They are absolutely fundamental.
These considerations in themselves are sufficient to prove the “vaccination” resisters’ case.
That burger looks amazing…
Just stating the obvious, but the burger won’t make somebody obese, or unhealthy. Obviously, if you ate those everyday and didn’t exercise, then you would feel less like exercising. Then you would struggle to exercise and subsequently would find breathing difficult. Eventually, if you caught a respiratory disease, you would likely struggle to deal with it.
I’m available for surgery every Wednesday afternoon.
See you next Wednesday, (Omicron permitting).
Great, I’ll treat you to a burger too!
In the 1950’s and 60’s people ate very fatty foods, sugar was usually in tea, jam, cakes and on cereal. When Ancel Keys developed his hypothesis that cholesterol was causative of atherosclerosis and cardiovascular disease, everything became low fat. However low fat meant reduced taste, so sugars were used to increase taste. Corresponding to the increase in sweeteners and reduction in saturated fat has been an increase in cardiovascular disease. Because of the cholesterol causes cardiovascular disease link statin use has increased, but statins can increase blood glucose levels and trigger type 2 diabetes in susceptible people.
The belief in that hypothesis seems to have led to a somewhat simplistic approach to acceptable cholesterol levels as well. Some years ago, as part of a typical ‘health check’, they measured mine via a blood sample, but then just issued a total value which looked a bit high, but no data about the ratio between it’s ‘high’ and ‘low’ density protein structure. It appears that the real ratio is more important than the overall total, but they are obsessed with the latter on account of that belief.
Looking on the bright side, they didn’t try to flog statins, but did issue a long list of dietary ideas!
I refer you to Malcolm Kendrick.
There was another study that showed SARS-CoV-2 is more likely to infect adipose fat tissue and that is why the “obese” (mostly self inflicted) are more prone to severe Covid-19.
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.10.24.465626v1?utm_source=vanity&utm_medium=fatcells&utm_campaign=magazineURL
That’s a nice looking burger!
So is Folly Dudson going to start screaming hatred against fat people?
What a topsy turvey world where eating healthy and staying fit is good for you.
Dr David Grimes, in recent interview with Dr Sebastian Rushworth, pointed out that the vitamin D3 status of the obese is poor because D3 is fat soluble and stored rather than available in blood. The degree to which it is ‘poor’ is only 20% of that available to the non-obese.
This, he believes, is the reason that the obese are more susceptible to disease.
The interview is very well worth watching, and his research over 30 years is compelling.
For some inexplicable reason none of the conflicted ‘scientists’ advising governments, the FDA, or the WHO have any interest in D3, except in suppressing its use, or seeking to have it banned, as a supplement, from sale to the public. Shamefully for the UK medical establishment, some of our foremost university experts have been at the forefront of the the suppression of the benefits of D3.
The point is well made. Over the last year I’ve been doing a bit of homework on this, and it became apparent that the Vitamin D3 compound is indeed ‘fat prevalent’ so that it ends up being stored in excess fat, rather than being available in water (i.e. our blood stream).
What was noticeable was that published guidelines for Vitamin D supplements has been changed quite a lot. For example, the older NHS site advised using 5 µg per day, but now it’s 10 µg. Some German ones recommend 20 µg per day.
The supermarkets have spotted the demand though – either under their own brand, or other products. I’ve got a tub of 25 µg ones from Morrisons, e.g.
The other significant issue is when to use it around the year. It varies a lot on one’s lifestyle re exposure to ultra violet B (which is the source of energy for the creation of preliminary compounds in our skin), but at this time of year there isn’t a lot of it about. It also depends on what we eat; some countries deliberately add supplements to some things, like dairy products (not done in the UK) e.g.
The other issue is that the definition of being ‘overweight’ or ‘obese’ is a rather wide scale (see the WHO definition: https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/obesity-and-overweight ). I could easily be well within the healthy range, but actually rather fat and somewhat unfit.
There appears to be a lot of incomplete knowledge of it’s role in the functionality of our immune system, though. E.g. here is an extract from https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6305614/
Two things that help to avoid becoming over lardy in my opinion.
1 .Eat mainly stuff that looks like what it is naturally fruit,veg ,eggs meat cuts ie avoid the overprocessed gloop thats full of E numbers and corn syrup derived sugars.
2 To help with 1 avoid any stuff in the unnatural brightly coloured packaging go with the natural looking foods only.
I bet if you check next time at the supermarket the lardy will have a trolley load of stuff that avoids 1 and2 above.
It amused that they included in the study people with BMIs in the mid 30s..thats danger lard territory .
Perhaps the Pig Dictator could take part is these studies as he is quite a porker..
What a surprise. Remember, just after the occasion when Boris J was admitted to hospital in the early days of the scam, one of the workers there “accidentally” published his body mass index; not a nice number. Made me wonder whether his background health had an effect on his attitude to the whole thing – after all, if it wasn’t too bad for him, he might not have fallen down the trap, as it were.
Doesn’t matter. Just lose weight if you’re obese.
This is important research.
There were suspicions that we could have lowered the impact of covid by telling all obese people to lose weight, but there wasn’t proof (it might be that it isn’t the weight itself, but perhaps just the propensity to become obese).
This paper strongly suggests that it is indeed the weight (possibly food intake levels) that makes the difference.
How many lives could have been saved by telling obese people that they have to lose weight.
I’m sure that all the vaccine mandate enthusiasts would add that we would have saved far more lives if we’d forced anyone with a BMI to lose weight, perhaps by denying them access to food, and shamed them as they walked around because they were literally killing people.
I had an interesting conversation with an obese man who had a gastric band fitted.
He said that he had covid before the vaccination rollout and that he hardly noticed he was ill. He said that he asked his doctor how come it was a mild infection and said doctor replied that it was more than likely because of the vitamin and mineral supplements that were provided as part of the treatment.
I really want a burger now…
Many months ago I postulated that leptin is the link between obesity and Covid-19 risk. Levels are high in the obese and it is a pro-inflammatory hormone. My suggestion made it to the Letters page of the Annals of Internal Medicine but I am not aware of any research that followed it up. Time to do so?